Ruling Allows Family to Sue Over Fatal Fire

Juan Zuniga’s daughter, three young grandchildren and mother-in-law died in the 1,200-degree heat of a second-floor bedroom when three vengeful drug addicts poured gasoline through the family’s mail slot and set their apartment ablaze.

More than four years after the 1991 fire at the Jordan Downs housing project in Watts, two of the arsonists are locked up for life and Zuniga, 68, and his family have moved to public housing on the Eastside.

But he and other surviving family members, who blame the Los Angeles City Housing Authority for refusing to move them to a unit away from drug dealers, say justice has yet to be served.

Their effort to get the housing authority to accept some blame for the fire got a boost in December, when the Zunigas won a state appeal court ruling allowing them to sue the authority. The ruling overturned a 1993 decision that said the family lacked sufficient grounds to sue.

Unlike many plaintiffs in civil suits, the Zunigas are not seeking punitive damages, only compensation for expenses from the fire and a procedural change in how quickly the housing authority responds to tenants who say they are in danger.

“The money is not important to us,” said Juan Zuniga, who was one of 17 family members inside the apartment when the fire broke out.

The Zunigas say that before the fire, the housing authority had several times denied their requests to move and ignored their repeated complaints about the drug users who gathered daily in front of their door.

According to the family, their problems began the day they moved to Jordan Downs in June 1991.

A group of crack cocaine users had long used the doorstep of the three-bedroom apartment as a hangout, and were upset that the family was moving in.

Family members said the drug users and dealers taunted them as they moved in, and harassed them daily by blocking their front door and blowing crack smoke through their mail slot as their children played in the living room.

The addicts were there at all hours, and whenever the family turned on the porch light the men would break the bulb, according to Juan Zuniga’s wife, Guadalupe Garcia Zuniga, 47.

One day, as Juan Zuniga returned from the store, three men who had been in front of his apartment beat and pistol-whipped him, knocking out several of the diminutive man’s teeth.

Shortly after Zuniga was beaten--just three months after the family moved into Jordan Downs--the fire was set.

On Sept. 7, 1991, at 6 a.m., Harold Mangram, Victor Spencer and Frank Villareal poured gasoline through the mail slot and lit it with a cigarette lighter.

Most of the members of the Zuniga family were asleep inside.

Prosecutors said the men set the fire to win the favor of drug dealers; the arsonists believed the dealers would pay them with crack for their action, prosecutors said.

The incident was at first perceived by some as racially motivated, since the Zunigas are Mexican immigrants and most of the drug users who tormented them were black.

But it was later learned that one of the arsonists is Latino, one is black and one is of mixed race.

The Zunigas’ neighbors, who were black, brought ladders to help the family escape the fire. One man who ran into the burning house to help the family was shot by Juan Zuniga, who mistook him for one of the arsonists.

Mangram, 50, and Spencer, 40, had each completed prison sentences for previous homicides. Both men are now serving life sentences without the possibility of parole.

Villareal, 33, received probation in exchange for his testimony against Mangram and Spencer.

Mrs. Zuniga and other family members said that housing authority officials ignored them when they complained of their problems with the drug dealers and would not allow them to transfer because they were not considered to be in life-threatening danger.

“We asked them for a transfer and they wouldn’t give it to us because nobody had died,” said one of Zuniga’s daughters, Maria Mazariegos, 27. “Well, people have died.”

A lawyer for the housing authority declined to comment on the case.

But Kenneth De Gon, the housing authority’s assistant executive director, said that the authority is much more responsive to tenants’ complaints about safety since the fire.

“Our procedures were OK then, but there’s a hypersensitivity to that now,” he said.

According to De Gon, arrangements have since been made to have police immediately look into tenants’ complaints, and residents can now be moved to another unit on the day they make a complaint if police believe their lives are threatened.